# Chapter 02: SL4 / Plan to Singularity

> Shock Level Four and open-source seed AI

Canonical URL: https://foom.hyperplex.org/chapter/sl4

Timeline: 1999–2000

SL4 was for the people who were already at “Shock Level Four.” People who took the Singularity, Jupiter brains, and mental revision seriously, rather than treating them as sci-fi concepts.

Around the same time, Yudkowsky published The Plan to Singularity and The Singularitarian Principles. In both, he argued for developing seed AI openly, with the hope of setting off a broader AI industry that could reach superintelligence on an aggressively short timetable, somewhere around 2005 to 2010.

## Predictions in this chapter

- [Seed AI by 2010, to outrace nanotech](https://foom.hyperplex.org/p/plan/index.html.md): Falsified: 2010; predicted 1999.
- [Nanotech ~2010; the Singularity ~2020](https://foom.hyperplex.org/p/crns/index.html.md): Falsified: 2020; predicted 1999.

## Chapter sources

- [SL4 Archives](http://sl4.org/archive/0008/0000.html)
- [The Plan to Singularity](https://web.archive.org/web/2002/http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/plan.html)